For the first sixty
pages, this book could have been compared to two different people -
neither of whom actually figure in the plot. I am speaking metaphorically.
The first one would undoubtedly have been male: a dilapidated, crusty
old academic; a man possessed of a genuine love for matters geometrical
("That was the
heart of the contradiction! Every vertex needed angles totalling 360
degrees around it, in order to lie flat... while every flat, Euclidean
triangle supplied just 180 degrees. Half as much."). This mad professor
knows everything about his chosen subject, and goes to great lengths
to punt his savvy from reader to reader. Greg Egan needs to pass on
a good deal of mathematical information.

Unfortunately (and largely because of such extrapolations), the
other spectral figure present for the first sixty pages is a baby,
born dangerously premature; fighting for breath, for existence.
For approximately one-sixth of the novel, it doesn't look like
the poor child will make it. Given all of this, the fact that
the reader continues is a triumph of hope over evidence. Were
it not for the fact that I had read a fair amount of Egan's shorter
fiction, and liked it; and were it not for the fact that
I had long since regarded Egan as one of the genre's high-flying
ideas men, I might have lost hope myself - and merely stumbled
on for the sake of professional duty. So while it is certainly
true that this section of the book is slow, and quite possibly
in the wrong place, one must persevere. The work gets better.

It begins in the year 2975. Life has evolved, or diversified rather,
into three broad groups: there are "fleshers" (sort
of present-day human hand-me-downs, the closest to modern day
man); there are "Gleisner robots" (machines with human
brains); and there are "polises" (computers containing
the software made up of uncountable numbers of human personalities).
The following extract might help to define more clearly the strengths
and weaknesses of each of these biological factions:

"Yatima recalled scenes from the library of fleshers involved
in simple tasks: repairing machinery, preparing food, braiding
each other's hair. Gleisners were even more dextrous, when the
right software was in charge. Konishi citizens retained the ancestral
neural wiring for fine control of their icons' hands - linked
to the language centres, for gestural purposes - but all the highly
evolved systems for manipulating physical objects had been ditched
as superfluous."

Yatima is one of the main players in Diaspora: the result
of an experiment in something called the Konishi polis. Yatima's
opinion, towards the end of the first sixty pages, reflects what
the reader has been thinking: "Polis citizens... were creatures
of mathematics; it lay at the heart of everything they were, and
everything they could become." It is Yatima's task to explore
the Coalition of Polises. Along with a friend called Inoshiro,
she visits a healthy community of "fleshers" in the
enclave of Atlanta, where she is informed by a great "neuroembryologist"
all about "bridgers" and about how "some species
of exuberants have changed so much that they can't communicate
with anyone else any more. Different groups have rushed off in
their own directions, trying out new kinds of minds - and now
they can barely make sense of each other, even with software intermediaries."

After twenty-one years have passed, it becomes known that the
Earth will be drenched, fairly soon, in a tide of gamma rays which
has been created by the collision of stars. This catastrophe is
set to occur (and how's this for premature ejaculation!) a full
seven million years too early. On returning to Atlanta
to let the fleshers know they're soon to be pulverized ("the
ground is frozen, and the rain's about to turn into nitric acid"),
Yatima and Inoshiro are greeted with a good deal of derision.
Harsh words, however, are far from the worst of their problems.

Why do the stars collide so long before the expected time? This
is what the survivors of the catastrophe try to ascertain. One
thousand polises are sent off into space (the diaspora of the
title) in order to find the answer. More problems are immediately
imminent, however, when it becomes clear that more danger is nigh
and that the only chance of escape is to disappear into an unseeable,
unknowable universe.

Greg Egan, as I mentioned before, is a real ideas man.
Even the distancing effect of "ve" and "ver"
serves more of a purpose than one believes at first it will. Egan
seems to have a mind full of impossible knots - which he then
goes out of his way to describe and untie for his audience. In
this novel he goes for the very big picture.

A few years ago I watched a then-recently made documentary about
the religious order called the Amish. They mistrust technology
and live in communities into which the twentieth century has scarcely
intruded. On camera a young Amish child asked, with conspiratorial
wonder, if it was true: had somebody really landed on the moon?
That epoch from twenty-five or so years earlier was still only
a whispered rumour in the Amish camps - or at least among the
younger generations there. Having finished Diaspora I wondered
what that same child might have made of some of the brain-churning
conceits in this interesting novel. Assuming, of course, that
the child could read. Egan has scattered his new seeds now; as
far as ideas are concerned he is flying in a sky on his own. But
I wish he'd worked a little more on making those opening pages
swing harder.